The Great Divorce

by C. S. Lewis

I was talking with two friends (CH and JH) around a firepit a few weeks ago, and they had both just started reading this. So, I decided I’d better join them. It’s a quick read. I used a subway ticket (from our trip to Boston last year) as a bookmark, which turned out to be somewhat appropriate, as the plot begins with a bus trip from Hell to Heaven.

Hell in this book is an ever-expanding gray city. The people are nasty to each other and generally whine and complain a lot. When the bus reaches Heaven, they find it “solid” and painful to them – every blade of grass is like a sharp rock. The “solid people” inhabiting Heaven are sometimes known to the ghosts from the bus, and they are trying to convince the ghosts to submit to being perfected and made holy. So it’s a little like Virgil and Dante climbing Purgatory.

A few quotes I marked:

[A solid person says:] "I will bring you not to the land of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God."

"Ah, but we must interpret those beautiful words in our own way! For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? 'Prove all things'... to travel hopefully is better than to arrive."

"If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for." (43)

(I don’t know that Heaven is truly the “land of answers” in the sense that every question will be answered there. But perpetual skepticism and avoiding all conclusions does not lead to hope. Hope itself is not the goal; it must be placed in something real. Deciding that we must forever inquire into what is real and never draw any conclusions means we can’t really have hope nor know what is real and true.)

Exposing Disney theology as the Language of the Lost:

The actual language of the Lost... One will say he has always served his country right or wrong; and another that he has sacrificed everything to his Art; and some that they've never been taken in, and some that, thank God, they've always looked after Number One, and nearly all, that, at least they've been true to themselves. (68)

"The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words, 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping." (69)

Compare this to the words, “Deny thyself, take up thy cross, and follow Me.”

Lewis is squishy on the reality of Hell – He has a solid person say that “Hell is a state of mind–ye never said a truer word… Heaven [on the other hand] is reality itself.” The entire premise of the book is that it’s recounting a dream, so Lewis is not saying that this is what Heaven/Hell really are like. But it’s still squishy.

Likewise, the premise suggests that one can die and not be judged yet. They can still impact whether they go to Heaven or Hell. “But there is a real choice after death?” (69) My note here is: “Is there one before?” See “The Bondage of the Will.” But the solid person responds that the narrator is here to observe “the nature of the choice itself.” There’s a problem in thinking we have a “choice” anyway, but maybe he’s saying that the point of the book is to examine choices, lines of reasoning, etc. that people take in life that lead them away from the cross. That much I can get behind.

"There have been some who were so occupied in the spreading of Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares." (71-72)

Not sure if I’m giving him too much credit, but he surprised me by avoiding decision theology here:

All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

But he’s squishy a page or two later when he writes, “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing.” (75) I doubt the souls in Hell (e.g., the rich man known to Lazarus) would agree.

About a temptation to artists:

Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. (81)

About the resurrection, on p. 104, he writes, “It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains.” (The Mountains being higher up and further in – deeper into Heaven.) This seems to deny a physical resurrection. But the risen Christ is flesh and blood, and our resurrection will be like His.